Education
Biased bots: Human prejudices sneak into artificial intelligence systems - ScienceBlog.com
In debates over the future of artificial intelligence, many experts think of the new systems as coldly logical and objectively rational. But in a new study, researchers have demonstrated how machines can be reflections of us, their creators, in potentially problematic ways. Common machine learning programs, when trained with ordinary human language available online, can acquire cultural biases embedded in the patterns of wording, the researchers found. These biases range from the morally neutral, like a preference for flowers over insects, to the objectionable views of race and gender. Identifying and addressing possible bias in machine learning will be critically important as we increasingly turn to computers for processing the natural language humans use to communicate, for instance in doing online text searches, image categorization and automated translations.
On the Gap Between Strict-Saddles and True Convexity: An Omega(log d) Lower Bound for Eigenvector Approximation
Simchowitz, Max, Alaoui, Ahmed El, Recht, Benjamin
We prove a \emph{query complexity} lower bound on rank-one principal component analysis (PCA). We consider an oracle model where, given a symmetric matrix $M \in \mathbb{R}^{d \times d}$, an algorithm is allowed to make $T$ \emph{exact} queries of the form $w^{(i)} = Mv^{(i)}$ for $i \in \{1,\dots,T\}$, where $v^{(i)}$ is drawn from a distribution which depends arbitrarily on the past queries and measurements $\{v^{(j)},w^{(j)}\}_{1 \le j \le i-1}$. We show that for a small constant $\epsilon$, any adaptive, randomized algorithm which can find a unit vector $\widehat{v}$ for which $\widehat{v}^{\top}M\widehat{v} \ge (1-\epsilon)\|M\|$, with even small probability, must make $T = \Omega(\log d)$ queries. In addition to settling a widely-held folk conjecture, this bound demonstrates a fundamental gap between convex optimization and "strict-saddle" non-convex optimization of which PCA is a canonical example: in the former, first-order methods can have dimension-free iteration complexity, whereas in PCA, the iteration complexity of gradient-based methods must necessarily grow with the dimension. Our argument proceeds via a reduction to estimating the rank-one spike in a deformed Wigner model. We establish lower bounds for this model by developing a "truncated" analogue of the $\chi^2$ Bayes-risk lower bound of Chen et al.
Data visualisation & machine learning courses among most valued today - Times of India
BENGALURU: The humongous amount of digital data being generated, and companies' need to glean insights and make predictions from them have made skills in data visualisation, data science, and machine learning among the most valued for technology recruiters today. This is reflected in the number of working professionals signing up for specialised courses in these spaces. Candidates who complete the courses tend to get between 20% and 50% increase in salaries. Kashyap Dalal, chief business officer at online learning platform Simplilearn, says that big data and analytics courses were the big growth drivers in the past three years. While data science continues to remain popular, accounting for 30% of all learners, courses on visualisation tools and machine learning have become very attractive over the past six months, he said.
Adaptive Neighboring Selection Algorithm Based on Curvature Prediction in Manifold Learning
Ma, Lin, Zhou, Caifa, Liu, Xi, Xu, Yubin
Recently manifold learning algorithm for dimensionality reduction attracts more and more interests, and various linear and nonlinear, global and local algorithms are proposed. The key step of manifold learning algorithm is the neighboring region selection. However, so far for the references we know, few of which propose a generally accepted algorithm to well select the neighboring region. So in this paper, we propose an adaptive neighboring selection algorithm, which successfully applies the LLE and ISOMAP algorithms in the test. It is an algorithm that can find the optimal K nearest neighbors of the data points on the manifold. And the theoretical basis of the algorithm is the approximated curvature of the data point on the manifold. Based on Riemann Geometry, Jacob matrix is a proper mathematical concept to predict the approximated curvature. By verifying the proposed algorithm on embedding Swiss roll from R3 to R2 based on LLE and ISOMAP algorithm, the simulation results show that the proposed adaptive neighboring selection algorithm is feasible and able to find the optimal value of K, making the residual variance relatively small and better visualization of the results. By quantitative analysis, the embedding quality measured by residual variance is increased 45.45% after using the proposed algorithm in LLE.
ZigZag: A new approach to adaptive online learning
Foster, Dylan J., Rakhlin, Alexander, Sridharan, Karthik
We develop a novel family of algorithms for the online learning setting with regret against any data sequence bounded by the empirical Rademacher complexity of that sequence. To develop a general theory of when this type of adaptive regret bound is achievable we establish a connection to the theory of decoupling inequalities for martingales in Banach spaces. When the hypothesis class is a set of linear functions bounded in some norm, such a regret bound is achievable if and only if the norm satisfies certain decoupling inequalities for martingales. Donald Burkholder's celebrated geometric characterization of decoupling inequalities (1984) states that such an inequality holds if and only if there exists a special function called a Burkholder function satisfying certain restricted concavity properties. Our online learning algorithms are efficient in terms of queries to this function. We realize our general theory by giving novel efficient algorithms for classes including lp norms, Schatten p-norms, group norms, and reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces. The empirical Rademacher complexity regret bound implies --- when used in the i.i.d. setting --- a data-dependent complexity bound for excess risk after online-to-batch conversion. To showcase the power of the empirical Rademacher complexity regret bound, we derive improved rates for a supervised learning generalization of the online learning with low rank experts task and for the online matrix prediction task. In addition to obtaining tight data-dependent regret bounds, our algorithms enjoy improved efficiency over previous techniques based on Rademacher complexity, automatically work in the infinite horizon setting, and are scale-free. To obtain such adaptive methods, we introduce novel machinery, and the resulting algorithms are not based on the standard tools of online convex optimization.
Learning Time Series Detection Models from Temporally Imprecise Labels
Adams, Roy J., Marlin, Benjamin M.
In this paper, we consider a new low-quality label learning problem: learning time series detection models from temporally imprecise labels. In this problem, the data consist of a set of input time series, and supervision is provided by a sequence of noisy time stamps corresponding to the occurrence of positive class events. Such temporally imprecise labels commonly occur in areas like mobile health research where human annotators are tasked with labeling the occurrence of very short duration events. We propose a general learning framework for this problem that can accommodate different base classifiers and noise models. We present results on real mobile health data showing that the proposed framework significantly outperforms a number of alternatives including assuming that the label time stamps are noise-free, transforming the problem into the multiple instance learning framework, and learning on labels that were manually re-aligned.
Jobs will be born out of human-artificial intelligence interface: UK varsity leader - Times of India
KOLKATA: Interface between artificial intelligence and humans will have to be meaningfully leveraged to generate jobs in future, according to Alice P Gast, president of Imperial College, London. In Kolkata to deliver a keynote address at a CII meet on Monday, Gast - an acclaimed researcher, scholar and academic leader - pointed out that computers will soon have to be turned into collaborators for work rather than mere tools to carry out tasks. Graduates must now be trained for'jobs that don't yet exist', she felt. "Artificial intelligence and robotics have already started replacing people, particularly in manufacturing type jobs. We should now look into new areas where there could be an interaction between the two. Human-machine interface will have to be seriously explored and university courses should be now designed to meet that challenge. Jobs in future will perhaps be more analytical and collaborative. Computers will be something you won't just be working with, but collaborating with," said Gast.
Machine Learning: The "Next Big Thing" in Education Getting Smart
Artificial intelligence (AI), in particular the field of machine learning, is touted as the "next big thing" according to Silicon Valley pundits. AI could be the key technology used to create cars that drive themselves or computers that diagnose some diseases better than doctors can. Backing up, though, let's take a moment to look at what exactly machine learning is. To put it simply, it's a computer that can program itself, usually by looking at feedback from its results. How is this important for education?